Douglas Coupland rushes into his kitchen to get some coffee. I’m standing just inside the door of the author’s home in an extremely exclusive West Vancouver neighbourhood, soaking in the rather striking surroundings and trying to decide whether I should take my shoes off. Before I can glimpse everything in the living room or decide what to do about my shoes, he calls from the kitchen: “Dan, come here.”

I slip off my shoes and head toward the kitchen, where Coupland quickly leads me to a door that opens onto his driveway. “It’s my posse,” he says, referring to a group of quite overweight squirrels – Coupland addresses some of them as “fatso” – who have gathered in a loose semi-circle around the door, waiting for him to scatter a handful of unshelled peanuts.

The squirrels are joined shortly by a collection of Steller’s jays, B.C.’s provincial bird. In the course of the not-quite two-hour interview, Coupland stops three separate times to feed the animals. Each time, one of the jays lands on Coupland’s hand to take peanuts from his palm.


FUN FACTOID #1: Generation X was pitched to, and rejected by, as many as two dozen Canadian and American publishers. The book has never had a separate Canadian publisher.


It is inevitable that Generation X, the era-defining term that Coupland chose as the title of his first book, will be mentioned in the first line of his obituary. Before St. Martin’s Press published Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture 15 years ago this spring, Coupland was a 29-year-old fledgling Canadian magazine writer. Anne Collins, who is now Coupland’s primary fiction publisher at Random House Canada, recalls occasionally seeing the young writer around the offices of Saturday Night when she was working there.

Coupland had studied art in school and dabbled in sculpture, and he says writing found him by accident. X, as Coupland calls it, was originally pitched as a guidebook to the generation born between the early 1960s and the late 1970s. St. Martin’s Press took the bait, and Coupland then submitted a novel that featured cartoons in the margins. One editor, Jim Fitzgerald, who is now an agent, championed the book and convinced St. Martin’s to publish it with an initial print run of 3,000. That printing sold out almost instantly, and the book became a cultural phenomenon.

From there, Coupland quickly established the high-volume publishing output that has become one of his trademarks. His sophomore novel, Shampoo Planet, was published in 1992. Since then, Coupland has published either a novel or a non-fiction book every year except 1997. Although he started out working directly with U.S. houses – first St. Martin’s and then with legendary editor Judith Regan at Simon & Schuster and HarperCollins – Coupland has found stable homes in recent years with two Canadian publishers: Random House Canada for his novels and Douglas & McIntyre for his Canadian-themed non-fiction.

His busy publishing schedule fails to take into account all of Coupland’s art projects and museum exhibitions, his participation in the film version of Souvenir of Canada, the screenplay he wrote for a forthcoming independent film called Everything’s Gone Green, the one-man play he performed in London, England in the fall of 2004, and more.


FUN FACTOID #2: While watching Jeopardy! one night, Coupland was surprised to see that there was a question about him. How did that feel? “I thought I was having an out-of-body experience.”


Inside Coupland’s kitchen, the day’s newspapers are laid out neatly on the kitchen table (there’s also a crisp copy of The New York Times from Sept. 12, 2001 on the coffee table). Coupland pours two cups of coffee and asks if I’ve read jPod, his upcoming novel, due on store shelves in May. He’s glad that I have, but he’s concerned about the formatting in the version that I’ve seen. The new book is patterned on one of Coupland’s previous novels, 1995’s Microserfs, and like that book, jPod features whole pages containing only catch phrases and numbers – one design challenge among many that may not yet have been resolved in the galleys.

Like Microserfs, jPod is a glimpse of life inside a cutting-edge workplace. Instead of Microsoft staffers (the subject of the earlier novel), the new book deals with six young employees of a Vancouver-area video-game company. While the two books share no characters or settings, the new one is considered a “Couplandian” sequel, to use Anne Collins’ word. Indeed, the author’s inspiration for jPod came from reading Microserfs again for the first time in years and finding that it was, in Coupland’s words, an “incredibly funny fucking book.”

To Coupland, writing a book about the culture of Microsoft employees in the early 1990s seemed like an obvious choice. In the early part of this decade, he felt he had two options. “Obviously, you’ve got Google and you’ve got gaming,” he says, after we’ve repaired to the living room. Making that choice easier was the fact that a number of video-game firms, including industry leader Electronic Arts, are based in B.C.’s Lower Mainland. “It’s Vancouver, and a lot of friends from art school … they’re working for EA, they’re working as independent producers, they’re working over at Radical,” says Coupland. “It’s in the air here.”

The new book is funnier than Microserfs, almost farcical in places. But snuck in amid the laughs are some serious observations. For instance, that the late-twentysomething protagonists work much harder than their grow-op-owning parents. The project also gave Coupland the chance to immerse himself in a culture he didn’t know much about. For Microserfs, he spent a great deal of time in the Seattle area and Silicon Valley. “That’s how I meet people,” he says. “I missed that.”


FUN FACTOID #3: Perhaps the least-known Coupland book is 2001’s God Hates Japan, a graphic-heavy book released only in, of course, Japan. Coupland says Tokyo is the only place other than the Vancouver area where he would live. He enjoys Toronto, but dislikes New York: “I know you’re supposed to love it and all that – I can’t stand the place.”


Predictably, our interview goes off-topic. The digressions include how Google killed off high school reunions and biographies; reference librarians; an Internet rumour that Coupland collects meteorites (he didn’t when the rumour started, but has since begun to); eBay (“I had to stop going to eBay – it was just too seductive”); the age-old question of why Michigan is broken into two parts; the TV set that Coupland first hooked up on the morning of the Oklahoma City bombing; and the social pressure to have a cellphone.

Coupland is also a big fan of reality TV. “I really, really like it,” he says. “I’m not judgmental about culture, high culture, low culture, middlebrow, or whatever. If it’s part of the modern world, if it’s part of modern life, you can’t be a snob.”

But the CanLit establishment is hardly so open-minded. Coupland is an accomplished and talented writer whose books are perennial bestsellers, but he’s often overlooked by literary tastemakers. The only major Canadian literary award he’s won is the Canadian Authors Association’s Mosaid Technology Inc. Award for Fiction for Hey Nostradamus! in 2004. “I think in some ways I’ve been very hard to pigeonhole for [critics and award juries],” Coupland says. “I think just because I’m coming from such a weird … alien direction, I just don’t think they know what to do with me a lot of the time.

“I think I do fine. I used to care so much. I stopped caring about five years ago.”

And then he gets out of his chair and leads me on a tour of his house, with a brief stop to feed the squirrels and the jays.


FUN FACTOID #4: Coupland was a consultant on the Steven Spielberg film Minority Report, focusing on how the future would look. “He brought in his art crew and his 3D modelers, so if you had an idea” – Coupland makes a sort of whirring sound meant to indicate rapid assembly – “it was visualized instantly. It was like walking around and having an endless document scrolling out of a laser printer showing what was in your head. If it was a drug, I’d take it.”


If Coupland truly doesn’t care about his literary reputation, then his publishers are eager to stand up on his behalf. “He has the best cultural antenna of anyone I have encountered. He just sees things that other people don’t,” says Douglas & McIntyre publisher Scott McIntyre, who crossed paths socially with Coupland before they hooked up for City of Glass in 2000. Coupland’s books for D&M have regularly been among the firm’s top sellers. “Aside from the cachet of having Doug, the fact that the books looked and acted differently than anything we had had up until then – clearly that was a blessing for us,” McIntyre says.

Meanwhile, Anne Collins says that when she became Coupland’s primary fiction editor, her personal mission was to make people see the gravitas in his work. “He’s someone other writers should reckon with a bit more,” she says.

In the U.K., the spiritual concerns of Coupland’s books are often at the forefront of his reviews. In Canada, he seems to be treated by reviewers as more of a curiosity. Coupland operates very much ouside the CanLit world; he says his only author friends are William Gibson and Chuck Palahniuk. “Every so often I’ll be at literary things, but I don’t know what to talk about with other writers. Pencils?”

Coupland is very serious about his writing, though, and can be withering in criticizing the literary scene. “If you ask someone who’s a painter or sculptor, ‘Who’s really rocking your world?’ They say, I don’t know, Damien Hirst, the young British artist, or someone out of New York. If you ask someone in the literary world … they’re, like, ‘Henry James,’” he says. “What? How old are you? What century do you live in? I think a lot of the literary world is just doing renderings. They’re not very interested in coming up with new forms or generating new ways of looking at words or forms or ideas.”


FUN FACTOID #5: One of Coupland’s art projects involved wasps’ nests made from the pages of his own books, as well as Gideon’s Bible. Hanging in his studio are a few real wasps’ nests that he got by placing an ad in a local newspaper. “Basically, there’s nothing in life that you can’t justify putting an ad in the North Shore News for by saying it’s for either an art project or a science project.”


Coupland’s next project is a follow-up to Terry, his 2005 book on Terry Fox. It’s called Memories of Terry: Canada’s National Scrapbook, an assemblage of recollections submitted by Canadians that he will edit with Fox’s brother, Darrell; D&M will publish it this fall. Anne Collins says that he also mentioned a new idea to her during a recent phone conversation, but no details are forthcoming.

Coupland also has at least one dream project. He’d like to recruit 10 different Vancouver photographers “and have them go around [my] house at different times of day with all their different techniques and methodologies, and just do a book on the house and do some form of pictorial autobiography.”

Professionally, Coupland is at a place in his career where he could probably get such a book published if he wanted to. He is exceedingly pleased with his relationship with both Random House and D&M, and says Collins is like family now, despite her “humbling, really humbling” edits. “I think because she’s coming from magazines, she can’t not fix things as she reads,” he says. “Maybe by the third and final pass she’s sort of tamed it.”

If Coupland has any problem, it’s not his but other peoples’: even now, not enough of his contemporaries care about what he’s doing. “I think a lot of people just think I’m from Mars,” Coupland says.

Our time is up; he’s going to drive me to a nearby mall so I can catch a taxi. As we take one last pass through the kitchen toward the driveway, the jays and fat squirrels outside begin to chirp and stir in anticipation of yet more peanuts. “I love you,” Coupland calls from the house to his waiting posse. “I’m coming.”